The German Genius

regards their moral existence. With a hitherto unknown consciousness (prodigiously fanned by authors) every nation now hugs itself and sets itself up against all other nations as superior in language, art, literature, philosophy, civilization, ‘culture.’ Patriotism is today the assertion of one form of mind against other forms of mind.” 25 It was, he added, impossible to “overstress” the novelty of this form of patriotism in history, inaugurated in Germany in 1813, and embodying three ideas—the movement against the Jews, the movement of the possessing classes against the proletariat, and the movement of the champions of authority against the democrats. 26
    Most of all, Benda saw a change in the behavior of intellectuals, creative people, scientists, and philosophers. Before the nineteenth century, he said, people of the character of Leonardo da Vinci, Goethe, Erasmus, Kant, Thomas Aquinas, Kepler, Descartes, Roger Bacon, Pascal, and Leibniz “set an example of attachment to the purely disinterested activity of the mind and created a belief in the supreme value of this form of existence.” Now, he said, it was very different. “Today, if we mention Mommsen, Treitschke, Ostwald, Brunetière, Barrès, Lemaître, Péguy, Maurras, d’Annunzio, Kipling, we have to admit that the ‘clerks’ now exercise political passions with all the characteristics of passion—the tendency to action, the thirst for immediate results, the exclusive preoccupation with the desired end, the scorn for argument, the excess, the hatred, the fixed ideas.” 27 In descending to the level of the rest of the public, Benda thought these men were betraying what they—or their predecessors—had stood for. They were not acting like Socrates or Jesus, but like the mob.
    Benda was anxious to show that this betrayal had occurred not just in Germany—indeed, as a Frenchman his chief focus was the French, but he extended his arguments from France to Germany, Italy, Britain, and America, more or less in that order, and he thought that German intellectuals had been especially culpable in World War I, in particular in regard to the Manifesto of the 93 (see Chapter 29). “We know how systematically the mass of German teachers in the past fifty years have announced the decline of every civilization but that of their own race, and how in France the admirers of Nietzsche or Wagner, even of Kant or Goethe, were treated by Frenchmen…” 28
    Although he excoriated his fellow French in this regard, Benda did think that German intellectuals had “led the way in this adhesion of the modern ‘clerk’ to patriotic fanaticism.” He thought it had begun with Lessing, Schlegel, and Fichte, who were “organising in their hearts a violent adoration for ‘everything German,’ and a scorn for everything not German. The nationalist ‘clerk’ is essentially a German invention.” 29
    Although he blamed novelists, dramatists, and artists equally, he reserved particular venom for historians, “German historians of the past half century and the French Monarchists of the past twenty years.” “‘A true German historian,’ declares a German master, ‘should especially tell those facts which conduce to the grandeur of Germany.’” The same scholar praises Mommsen (who himself boasted of it) for having written a Roman history “which becomes a history of Germany with Roman names.” And the philosophers were hardly better. “Fichte and Hegel made the triumph of the German world the supreme and necessary end of the development of Being…” 30 Not even the French could compete here, he said. The German historians, says Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, onetime director of the French school in Athens, “urge their nation to be intoxicated with its personality, even to its barbarity. The French moralist does not lag behind…” What had ruined Germany in World War I, Benda felt, was that its material strength was not equal to the arrogance that had been bred by this intellectual nationalism. The Germans, too, he said, were responsible for the cult of the powerful state. The learned had divinized politics. 31
    The most important effect in all this, Benda thought, and it was a profound point, was that the military life and war, fought inevitably with nationalist aims in mind, became attached to morality rather than utility. 32 Courage, honor, and harshness came to be extolled by the learned—even, in the case of Nietzsche, cruelty (“Every